Most people searching the World Wide Web (WWW) use search engines that are designed to help locate information stored on the billions of Web pages and other documents that are accessible via the WWW (hereinafter “documents”). Most, if not all, search engines search the WWW for documents using “search queries.” Search queries can include one or more ordered words, phrases, combinations of words or phrases (hereinafter “terms,” “query terms,” or “search terms”).
In many cases, a search query submitted in a language that is not widely used is likely to return few documents, or documents of less relevance to the search query than an equivalent query submitted in a popular language, such as English. Accordingly, improved methods of processing queries to provide improved search results, including search results translated from a language other than the language of the search query, are desirable.
On the other hand, automatic translation of queries and query results is expensive. Therefore it would be desirable to determine when such translation is unnecessary, or unlikely to be useful to the user, and in those circumstances to avoid translating the search query and search results, thereby eliminating the computational expense associated with unnecessarily translating search queries and search results.